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I can see the sales pitch, thats great, but do i need that soft?So many reviews on HD's that dont last 6monthsIt' would be cool to see your drive indicating "dude i'm aboot to take a crap on you and ur data too" :'(

Compare the price of Spinrite ($89) to the price of a new external hard drive (as low a $60 depending on capacity). I think you'd be a lot better off setting up an automated back-up protocol to the external drive. In the event that you have a hard drive failure and if you use Spinrite (which may or may not recover everything on the drive) would you then trust that drive? No, you'd replace it and would then want a complete back-up to restore to your new drive.

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Steve ... Ancient One-look to the sky with imagination, grasp the wind with outstretched arms and take flight

Supposedly handled by "SMART" (Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) which currently exists on most if not all (IDE and Ultra ATA drives). 5 or 10 years later, support still SUCKs (black hole level), especially under RAID configurations.

98% of the time the pain you experience will be exerted by files that haven't been picked up in a backup window. If you can spring for it, there's a lot to be said for RAID and "shadowing" (particularly of data files).

I've got Spinrite, and I think it's great. It has restored 2 hard drives for me that had problems.

It is NOT a replacement for backing up, though. I still back up anything that I wouldn't want to lose. But Spinrite can very often repair damaged data and allow you to fix the drive without having to go to further trouble.

If you have a hardware failure, it won't help you, but data can get corrupted and make you think you've got a failed drive. It's a worthwhile first pass, IMO.

I backup pretty regularly to an external HDD, and I also sprang for SpinRite a while ago. I'm a big fan of Steve Gibson's online info and free utilities, etc., but SpinRite did 0 for me and my drives, unlike Jeff's experience. I tried it on a couple of drives, at least one of which had problems. It spent maybe days of time grinding away, and ended up doing nothing useful, alas.

There are several free programs out there that can display SMART info, or even "alarm" when the numbers change. And each HDD costs so much less and holds so much more. . .

Well i didnt think this would get so many replies , but cool anyways. So we could classify this as a geek tool? ???Not a lifesaving piece of soft? We know that HD recovery is costly, but a tool that could maybe save u the trip to geeksquad (theyd send it out anyways right?) for recovery of business data. Being a DOS based itnerface i prob couldnt use it. I'm xp forward. But it would seem of the few tools a regular guy could use to recover HD's?

I absolutely stand by Spinrite, been using it for many years. Lots of respect for its author (Steven Gibson). SMART is supposed to catch these things, and you need to do regular backups- but often enough my users don't or won't do regular backups. And SMART will not catch stupid human tricks (I dropped my laptop!). Proven to be a great tool by my network operations team.

Browndude, IIRC it's pretty straightforward to use. I think it starts with a simple menu, where you choose the "depth" of the scan. XP, Dos, Linux, whatever, you won't have trouble starting it.

I also have lots of respect for its author (Steven Gibson), and I'd be glad to report that SR saved my bacon once or twice. But no. I think I tried it twice, and it went very slowly and ended up not fixing what I'd hoped it would. I remember very few other details now, several years later.

I endorse Spinrite fully - it has restored two of my drives which died. Both of which I was quoted big dollars to get the data extracted from.It cheaply saved my family photos before I had a backup strategy in place.

It actually works below the file level of the hard drive (one of the few peices of software that does) so will actually repair the drive well enough to suck off the contents before it physically dies.

SMART does next to nothing as an indicator of failure. Spinrite not only does repairs of near dead drives, but running it regularly stops drive failure in many cases (or at least accuratley provides a measure for how badly it is performing).

Still need a backup strategy though. A mixture of offsite and on site backups, clones of drives and incremental backups is the best approach.

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